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I recently removed about 600 'thin' pages from my site which are now showing as 404 errors in WMT as expected. As I understand it I should just let these pages 404 and eventually they'll be dropped from the index. There are no inbound links pointing at them so I don't need to 301 them. They keep appearing in WMT as 404's though so should I just 'mark as fixed' until they stop appearing? Is there any other action I need to take?

The mobile site is not operated by me unfortunately.

Thanks for your reply. How would I add a delay to this code?

Yesterday I implemented a mobile redirect as I don't have a mobile version of my site. As a result I've seen a drop in traffic which makes sense as my redirect script is at the top of the page. If I were to move the redirect script below the analytics code would that allow me to still track mobile users? Would this affect my bounce rate though?

As an update I've just compared the analytics code in my page to that in my analytics admin and they're different. Could it be I'm using an old analytics code somehow? The UA numbers are the same etc... but the codes are definitely different. Should I update the code on my pages or leave it?

There's no correlation between click in the 'search queries' report in WMT and analytics. Analytics organic google traffic is over double what is shown in webmaster tools. When I look at the graphs over the last 30 days in each they look similar its just that analytics is showing more traffic than WMT. I've checked I only have the analytics code once on the page. What could be causing this?

Following uploading a disavow file do you need to submit a reconsideration request or just wait for a refresh?

Yes rankings have dropped. I had around 10 competitive keywords on the first two pages some time ago and now only about 3 remain. The rest are not in the top 50 which leads me to believe its something algorithmic. So far I have:

1. Removed 'local' pages that had thin content

2. Removed a directory on my site that had pages from other directories in it by accident causing possible duplicate content.

3. Identified sites that had more than 3 or 4 links pointing towards my site and got any links over that number removed.

4. Disavowed some links that could be considered low quality.

Like I said I hoping when a panda/penguin refresh comes along it fixes the problem. I'm just guessing though as to what the problem is as crossing my fingers!

About a year ago I added a lot of 'local' pages trying to attract long tail queries but removed them recently as they weren't bringing in traffic and added little value. I removed them in case they were seen as 'doorway pages'. My site has just gone from several hundred pages to 50 odd. I've got lots of 404's but I'm hoping if its a penalty it'll pick up in the next panda/penguin refresh.

It was my main landing pages (for competitive keywords) that suffered so I'm hoping they'll bounce back. If it's not that I don't know what it is!

Weekly attached.

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I spent 6 months getting top 10 rankings for a site without the keywords in the domain. I've just recently built a site with the exact match keyword in the domain and am stunned to see the site in the top 10 after 2 months and minimal link building in a highly competitive industry. I personally believe that the domain name has played a part in this. My advice is wherever possible include your main keywords in the domain.

As I understand it Google + post links are now no follow. The rest listed are too. Remember though that you need a range of do follow and no follow links for a natural backlink profile. The best thing you can do with your google plus profile is set up google authorship. A strong trust signal for google.

I've just added categories to my wordpress site and some of the posts show in several of the categories. Will this cause me duplicate content problems as I want the category pages to be indexed? Also as I add more categories I'm creating more links on the page. They can't be seen to the user as I have a plugin that creates drop down categories. When I go to 'view source' though all the links are there so google will see lots of links. How can I fix the too many links problem? And should I worry about duplicate content issue?

You need to create a new post for each plane you have for sale (unless you've done this already) and the assign the category to each of the posts. Each aircraft added in your case will populate the category page however you should be sure to add unique content to the category page. A good way to do this is to add a category description at the top of the category page. If you're using wordpress then I use the 'all in one category updater' to do this. You obviously need to make sure that the category pages can be indexed by Google and then build quality links to the category page from external websites using a mix of brand, partial match keywords, exact match keywords and url links. The key here is natural variation.

As an amatuer SEO I was really please with the results when I optimised my pages and starting link building. I've managed to get myself to the bottom of page one for almost all my main keywords over a 6 month period. However since then I've been building links for the last couple of months and have seen very little movement in my SERPS positions at all! I expected it to be harder on page one but not this hard! According to SEO Moz campaign tools my on page results are all A so I dont think I can optimise any more. I'm beginning to think it's not links I need and I'm missing something like not enough social media mentions etc  however many of my competitors on page one don't appear to engage with social media much at all.

I'm at a loss really as to wether to just keep building links through guest posts, articles, forums, directories or try a different approach. i wonder if some of you more experienced SEO's could take a look and offer any ideas. My site is http://www.musicliveuk.com and I'm trying to rank for

Entertainment Agency

Entertainment Agencies

Wedding Band

Wedding Singer

Function Band

Cover Band

(I have optimised pages for each of these keywords in the footer)

I've also noticed that a lot of my competitors have links on lots of blogs that I can't seem to get links on. I would normally contact them and offer to guest post but I can find any contact details. I'm beginning to think my competitors have set these sites up as well for link building purposes. Is that ethical?

Please help!

I'm currently using SEO category updater plugin. I have about 10 posts per category showing snippets of each not the full page. If I write a new title, and description for each page, about around 50 words of text would that be enough for google to identify the page as being unique? The problem is I have hundreds of categories so it could be very time consuming.

Google has done a crawl of my site and is flagging up duplicate titles on my wordpress site. This appears to be due to the face that some posts are tagged in more than one category. I have just gone to make sure that each post just has one category and add redirects and I've noticed that all the duplicate title issues google has notified me about appear to redirect anyway. For example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/latest-news/live-music-boosts-australian-economy and  http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/live-music-boosts-australian-economy have duplicate titles apparantly but the 1st url redirects to the 2nd one. I use the redirection plug in but have no redirection set up for that url so I'm a bit confused. And if they're redirecting anyway then why is google flagging up duplicate titles?

Any help would be much appreciated.

I'm working on creating pages to target local SEO. I've created pages for example 'wedding band london' with useful content and optimised them with title tags, alt tags etc and will continue to do so for major cities and queries where there are significant search volume. However, I also want to pickup longtail local search queries such as 'wedding band camden' etc... Will adding a list of towns somewhere on the page for each city or county help drive traffic to the site from such queries? Is so what's the best way to structure the page?

I did it myself and have landed on page one for all my search terms but it's taken a year with several hours a day and is a lot of work. I looked at outsourcing but I'm glad I've done it myself as knowing what I know now I wouldn't trust anyone else to do it for me. If your business relies heavily on internet sales then when hiring an SEO you are putting the success of your business largely in their hands. Personally I wasn't prepared to do that. I've just written a blog post on SEO Moz about my SEO journey so hopefully it will be approved by the moderators and might be worth a read when live.

Hi,

I have various pages set up such as http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is there any benefit in SEO terms to changing it to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer? I would presume that a keyword would be better for SEO than 'home' which is irrelevant? Also if I were to change it would all the links external I have on other sites pointing to http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer be lost as the url no longer exists?

I suppose I could set up a manual redirect from http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer or would wordpress automatically redirect from the old to new? By redirecting I understand that some 'link juice' is lost along the way so is including the keyword in the url of enough benefit to warrant losing some link juice?

Finally if I do change the url to include the keyword how do I do it in wordpress? I can only see how to change the page title using the 'edit' button when editing a page?